Years ago, during one of Dana White’s frequent flirtations with boxing, White offered a reporter a tour of what he planned to turn into the boxing wing of UFC’s Las Vegas training center. Large, glass walled offices that sat empty would soon be occupied by seasoned boxing-types, White said. What White did for UFC, turning a financially failing mixed martial arts outfit into a company valued at $12 billion, he wanted to do for boxing.
Nothing came of it back then. White continued to plow forward with UFC, which later joined forces with WWE under one banner: TKO, which last week announced, in partnership with Saudi Arabia, the formation of a new boxing promotion, with White as the face of it. Inside a tiny Manhattan hotel room, White addressing the same reporter, was asked what has changed.
“Easy,” White said, pointing his thumb at a man seated to his left. “Him.”
Him is Turki Alalshikh. Alalshikh wears many hats: Royal advisor, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, owner of Ring Magazine, which Alalshikh purchased last November. Backed by Saudi’s billions, Alalshikh has quickly become boxing’s most powerful figure. He puts together deep cards, pays out huge purses and forces longtime rivals to work together.
Now, with White, Alalshikh wants to tear it all down.
Boxing, Alalshikh says, is “too broken.” The sport has no governing body. Too many belts. Cards are filled with mismatches. Boxers, once formidable figures in the U.S. sports landscape, are recognizable only inside the sport’s increasingly shrinking bubble. White, Alalshikh says, is his “bulldozer.”
Says Alalshikh, “He knows how to build models from scratch.”
It’s true. UFC was on the brink of bankruptcy when White and his partners purchased it in 2001. They had, in White’s words, “an old wooden octogen, three letters and a dozen fighters under contract.” Politicians referred to the sport as human cockfighting. Two decades later, mixed martial arts is mainstream—with UFC the dominant force in it.
In boxing, White sees a similar challenge. He disputes the idea that UFC is a monopoly. There have been competitors over the years, White says. He has just bested them. He aims to lure top talent with money and access to UFC’s state-of-the-art performance centers. He doesn’t believe competition will disappear. But he believes that, like with UFC, he will eventually get the better of them.
“I think there's a lot of [promoters] out there that will continue to do what they do,” says White. “And some of them will be successful and some of them won't. When we started the UFC, there were organizations that were bigger than we were. And we stood our line and built our business the way that we felt it should be built. And nothing happens overnight. We grinded, and grinded, and grinded, and here we are—and we're going to do the same thing [in boxing]. Some of those guys will exist. Some of them are going to go away. Some of them I will hate. Some of them I will like. And we'll see how it all plays out over the next several years.”
Says Alalshikh, “I think if they understand and want a relationship, they will find a way to [work with the new promotion]. If they don’t understand it, they need time to understand it. And they need to spend a lot of money. And a lot of them will [go] bankrupt until they understand. They'll understand it after they [go] bankrupt.”
Perhaps. White says a venture like this has never been done before. Others disagree. In 2015, Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions (PBC), backed by private equity, bought up time on several U.S. networks, including NBC and CBS. PBC is now a slimmed down operation with a small distribution deal with Amazon Prime. In 2018, Eddie Hearn aligned himself with DAZN, then a fledgling streaming service, using its deep pockets to go on a signing spree. Hearn remains an influential promoter but the sport is as fractured as ever.
White insists what he is doing is different. Indeed, no one has entered the boxing space with the cash of Alalshikh, who can access seemingly limitless funds. But White says it’s about more than money. “I’ve had the money,” says White. “I could have done this a million times.” It’s the shared vision with Alalshikh that is purportedly different.
“All the guys that you're talking about, they did it the same way it's always been done,” says White. “It's never been done the way that this is going to be done.”
TKO’s best asset is Nick Khan, WWE’s president who will have an executive role in the new promotion. Khan is a deeply respected figure. He has managed fighters, including Manny Pacquiao and James Toney. As an agent, he negotiated Top Rank’s deals with ESPN. In 2020, Khan moved to WWE. He negotiated WWE’s rights deal with Netflix—reportedly worth $5 billion over the next 10 years—and has overseen several years of record-setting revenue.
“Nick knows exactly what he’s doing,” says a promoter who has worked with Khan. “If you’re looking for a reason why this thing will work, it’s him.”
Around boxing, though, there is confusion. “I felt a little offended,” Golden Boy Promotions CEO and boxing legend Oscar De La Hoya recently said about White and Alalshikh’s alliance.
Sanctioning bodies are parasites—incompetent at best, corrupt at worst. Belts are manufactured, rules rarely enforced, ratings manipulated to line pockets. Consider: On May 2, Ryan Garcia and Rolly Romero will headline a Ring Magazine show. The WBA is reportedly planning to sanction the fight for a 147-pound title. The problem: Neither fighter has ever fought in the 147-pound division.
Said another promoter, “If [TKO] wants to get everyone together to squeeze them out, I think everyone would be on board for that.”
Still, a day before Alalshikh announced plans to bankroll TKO, he held a press conference for a three-fight card in New York run by all the major U.S. promoters. The same week he dismissed the alphabet sanctioning bodies, the WBC rolled out a list of more than 100 fighters who will compete in a Riyadh Season sponsored tournament.
While making plans to break the current model, Alalshikh is simultaneously keeping it intact.
“I don’t think [it’s the end of our relationship], but if [Alalshikh] has moved on, thank you very much,” Hearn said. “I've enjoyed it. I've made a lot of money and our fighters have had a great opportunity. My relationship with His Excellency is a very good one. It's a very deep one.
“But if we shook hands today and never worked again, we'd go back to doing 35 shows a year globally and still being the biggest in the world. But I believe this is just the beginning. If everybody wants to work together, great. If there's a fight all of a sudden, I'm up for that as well. I'm chilled. I really am.”
White says he has a “full roster,” though the only fighter certain to appear on TKO’s first show is Callum Walsh, a 154-pound contender backed by White. White will have “all the tools” to build out the company, Alalshikh says. The plan is to promote shows filled with top prospects. “All these guys are going to start fighting each other,” says White. Stacked cards, White says, with competitive fights from start to finish.
“And like Turki said, and knock on wood that he's right, he said this will happen much faster than the UFC, because we already have all the tools,” says White. “It's a different world than it was in 2001.”
Indeed. UFC’s rise to the mainstream has been remarkable. Now White wants to bring boxing back there. In Alalshikh, White has a partner with the resources to do it. In Khan, a strategist with the know-how to guide it there. There will be resistance, the kind White never experienced when building UFC. His marching orders from Alalshikh are to bulldoze right through it.
“This is a sport that has made trillions of dollars in revenue throughout its history, and at the end of the day there's nothing there,” says White. “It's broken, fragmented, and the big fights [without Alalshikh] never happen.” Fixing it, says White, will take work. He points again to Alalshikh. “And if I'm going to do it, this was the guy to do it with and this was the time to do it.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Dana White, Turki Alalshikh Aiming to Upend Boxing’s Fractured Foundation.